Dead! From Red Square! It's Vladimir Ilyich Lenin! In Wednesday's editions, the former Communist Party daily Pravda, for the first time in Soviet history, is running a front-page picture of Lenin inside his Red Square mausoleum. The four column close-up shows the remarkably preserved founder of the Soviet state in repose, and accompanies an article in which correspondent Nikolai Krivomazov argues that it would be indecent to pitch Lenin out of his granite...

PRAGUE (Reuters) - A group of former Soviet and European Union states called on Friday for a de-escalation of tensions in Ukraine including the withdrawal of Russian troops from the border, Czech President Milos Zeman said after a meeting in Prague. Russia's President Vladimir Putin overturned decades of post-Cold War diplomacy by announcing the right to use military force in neighboring countries when he annexed Crimea in March. Former Soviet members of the...

By Reviewed by Douglas Seibold, A writer who reviews regularly for the Tribune | February 8, 1991

The Other Russia: The Experience of Exile Edited by Michael Glenny and Norman Stone Viking, 474 pages $24.95 The history of the Soviet Union is still being rewritten, as facts and perspectives on its troubled, 73-year course come to light. But the history of the Soviet nation has been paralleled by that of another Russia-the approximately 3 million people who have left the country since the overthrow of the Romanovs and the establishment of the Soviet state. The...

KIEV (Reuters) - Amnesty International accused Russia, Ukraine and the five Central Asian states on Wednesday of colluding in abductions and unlawful transfers of asylum-seekers and refugees back to Central Asia where they faced the risk of torture. In a report, the London-based human rights group enumerated cases of asylum-seekers in Russia and Ukraine being spirited away from their apartments or picked up on the street and being forcibly flown back to the...

Vyacheslav Molotov, Josef Stalin's loyal lieutenant who became a symbol of the Soviet dictator's ruthlessness and uncompromising xenophobia, has died at the age of 96, Soviet media reported Monday. In a terse statement, Tass news agency said Mr. Molotov died Saturday "after a lengthy and grave disease." He served as Soviet prime minister from 1930 to 1941 and as foreign minister from 1939 to 1949 and from 1953 to 1956. Mr. Molotov was one of the last survivors of...

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin won praise from leaders of former Soviet republics on Tuesday and called for closer integration among the now-independent states once ruled by Moscow. He pointedly decided to snub a G8 summit in the United States this weekend and instead made the one-day conference of post-Soviet leaders the first meeting with foreign heads of state of his new presidential term. Putin, who once called the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union "the...

The Kremlin's chief ideologist Tuesday virtually ruled out the publication of the works of exiled author Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the Soviet Union. Vadim Medvedev, a member of the ruling Politburo who was recently promoted to the job of ideology boss for the Communist Party, told reporters that the publication of Solzhenitsyn in the Soviet Union would undermine society. "To publish Solzhenitsyn's works would mean in effect to undermine the foundations on which today's life rests," he...

Nineteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and 17 years since the demise of the Soviet Union, it may be hard for younger Americans to believe there was a time when communism looked as though it might eventually triumph. In the 1960s, the Soviet Union was building a vast nuclear arsenal, keeping Eastern Europe enslaved, assisting "national liberation movements" in the Third World, and watching the United States being bled by Soviet-supported communist North Vietnam. Marxism was even attracting...

The one thing in the state that Lenin founded that is not breaking down, Dr. Sergei Debov believes, is Lenin. Debov should know. He is the man in charge of Lenin's body, and he is proud that in almost 40 years he has spent faithfully inspecting, bathing and monitoring the relic, it has not changed a bit. That's more than can be said for the Soviet state. "If a pathologist looked at samples of skin from Lenin and a fresh corpse under a microscope," the 72-year-old scientist...

Charles E. Dickerman was quiet and unassuming, yet lived a life with diverse interests ranging from his work in nuclear engineering at Argonne National Laboratory to organizing a singalong of Handel's "Messiah" through the Presbytery of Chicago. Later in life, he learned to play the bagpipes and became a member of the Chicago Highlanders Pipe Band. He was the last charter member of the Downers Grove Rotary Club and was an active member of the Worship, Music and Arts committee of the...

President Mikhail Gorbachev and his chief rival, Russian leader Boris Yeltsin, on Friday offered their countrymen widely different views on Sunday's national referendum to decide the future of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev told the nation that the referendum was crucial to the preservation of a stable society and the ultimate success of his six-year-old reforms. Yeltsin said that the vote was meaningless. Millions of Soviets are being asked to vote on whether they approve or...

In the early 19th Century, czarist Russia and the British Empire shadowboxed over Central Asia in an exercise of diplomatic brinkmanship that historians would later dub the Great Game. The U.S. insists it has no designs on replaying that game. "We do not look at Central Asia as an object in a Great Game," Daniel Fried, a top State Department envoy for Eurasian affairs, said recently in Washington. "We do not look at this as a zero-sum contest between the United States, the Russians and the...

Every time you tell yourself you will just not be surprised again by anything that happens in the Soviet Union these days, you wake up another morning to find you`re wrong. At least it seems that way. It isn`t remarkable enough that Mikhail Gorbachev is siding with the U.S. in opposition to Iraqi aggression in the Persian Gulf? That 13 of the 15 Soviet republics have voted for varying degrees of independence? That the other great national debate is not about whether to move to a market...

The windows of Nikolai Baranovsky's electronics shop on Chicago Avenue tell the story of two fights that have fired the imagination of Ukrainians around the world. On one side is a poster of presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko, whose supporters have protested in Kiev to overturn the results of an election that was ruled fraudulent. Nearby is a poster for Vitali Klitschko, a 6-foot-7 Ukrainian heavyweight who will defend his World Boxing Council title against British slugger...

A Kremlin official writing in Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, says the Soviet Union is following a "new foreign policy philosophy." It no longer promotes revolution in other countries. In fact, according to Yevgeny Primakov, the whole concept of exporting revolutions is outdated, a holdover from the prenuclear age. Mr. Primakov, head of the Moscow-based Institute of the World Economy and International Relations, has been a semi-official spokesman for Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his...

"Power Trip," opening Friday for a week run at Facets, is cinema journalism on a deeply troubling subject: director Paul Devlin's ("SlamNation") disturbing, yet weirdly entertaining tale of the lights going out in Georgia. That's not our Georgia, but the country that was part of the old Soviet Union and the birthplace of late dictator Joseph Stalin, and today a land where the crumbling economic and social superstructure of part of the old Soviet Union is illuminated. ...

The Soviet Union has declared an unconditional amnesty for soldiers who deserted while serving in Afghanistan, Soviet Atty. Gen. Alexander Sukharev said Monday. He said the deserters are living in Pakistan, the United States, Canada and Western Europe. Sukharev, who said the amnesty was decided by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (parliament) over the weekend, told reporters that any soldier who left his duty for whatever reason is free to return home without fear of punishment.

Secretary of State Colin Powell sought Tuesday to allay Russian concerns over a growing American military presence in countries that once were part of the Soviet empire, saying, "We are not trying to surround anyone." In a radio interview, Powell said the U.S. may put small, temporary military facilities in several former Warsaw Pact countries that would be used for training of forces or as air bases for flying to crisis points in Central Asia, the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.

Fifty years after the opening of the Central Lenin Museum, the sanctum sanctorum of this city's communist memorials, the arch heretic of the Bolshevik Revolution has been admitted. Without fanfare-indeed, with a touch of trepidation-the museum authorities recently revised a number of exhibits to include photographs of Leon Trotsky, whose bitter split with the party leadership in the early 1920s made him the main villain of Soviet history. Other disgraced...